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Resilience: International Policies,

Practices and Discourses
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Revelations of resilience: From the

ideological disarmament of disaster
to the revolutionary implications of
(p)anarchy
Alf Hornborg

Human Ecology Division , Lund University , Slvegatan 12, 223

62 , Lund , Sweden
Published online: 28 May 2013.

To cite this article: Alf Hornborg (2013) Revelations of resilience: From the ideological
disarmament of disaster to the revolutionary implications of (p)anarchy, Resilience: International
Policies, Practices and Discourses, 1:2, 116-129, DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2013.797661
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Resilience, 2013
Vol. 1, No. 2, 116129, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.797661

Revelations of resilience: From the ideological disarmament of disaster

to the revolutionary implications of (p)anarchy
Alf Hornborg*

Downloaded by [Lund University Libraries] at 05:12 18 January 2015

Human Ecology Division, Lund University, Solvegatan 12, 223 62 Lund, Sweden
The currently burgeoning discussions on socio-ecological resilience tend to mask the
power relations, contradictions of interest, and inequalities that to a large extent
determine how humans utilise the surface of the Earth. On the other hand, resilience
theory has the potential to radically confront such power structures by identifying some
of the basic assumptions of economics as the very source of vulnerability,
mismanagement, and crises. It has every reason to critically scrutinise the operation
of general-purpose money, the global market, and neoliberal ideology. The ultimate
implications of resilience theory, in other words, are vastly more radical and subversive
than its current proponents imagine. A strategy to enhance socio-ecological resilience
would be to distinguish local from global economic scales by employing separate
currencies for the two levels. Proponents of resilience theory are advised to engage
more respectfully with social science, particularly its understandings of culture and
power. Upon doing so, they would find the idea of a bi-centric economy, as sketched in
this article, entirely consistent with the fundamental insights of resilience theory.
Keywords: resilience; power; culture; economic anthropology; neoliberal ideology;
local money

Introduction
It can be argued that discourses on the sustainability of human environmental relations
that ignore their political dimension are not only incomplete, but also in themselves as
ideologies manifestations of power. In this article, I begin by arguing that the currently
burgeoning discussions on socio-ecological resilience1 tend to mask the power relations,
contradictions of interest, and inequalities that to a large extent determine how humans
utilise the surface of the Earth. On the other hand, I hope to demonstrate the underexplored

A first draft of this paper was presented at a workshop organised by the Lund University Centre of
Excellence for the Integration of Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability (LUCID), Lund
University, 5 6 December 2012. LUCID is funded by the Swedish Research Council for
Environment, Agriculture and Spatial Planning (FORMAS).
*Email: alf.hornborg@hek.lu.se
1
See Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke, eds., Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management
Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998); Simon A. Levin et al., Resilience in Natural and Socio-Economic Systems, Environment
and Development Economics 3, no. 2 (1998): 222 35; Garry D. Peterson, Political Ecology and
Ecological Resilience: An Integration of Human and Ecological Dynamics, Ecological Economics
35, no. 3 (2000): 323 36; Lance H. Gunderson and Crawford S. Holling, eds., Panarchy:
Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, DC: Island Press,
2002); Fikret Berkes, Johan Colding, and Carl Folke, eds., Navigating Social-Ecological Systems:
Building Resilience for Complexity and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Carl Folke, Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social-Ecological Systems Analyses,
Global Environmental Change 16, no. 3 (2006): 253 67.

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

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potential of resilience theory to radically confront such power structures by identifying

some of the basic assumptions of economics as the very source of vulnerability,
mismanagement, and crises. The most basic assumption of economics is arguably its faith
in general-purpose money and global markets as signalling systems that promote the most
efficient allocation of resources. Contrary to this assumption, I shall argue that the logic of
general-purpose money in several respects promotes inefficiency, if other parameters such
as energy are taken into account. Of more immediate relevance in this context, however, is
the inclination of general-purpose money and global markets to reduce local socioecological resilience. This conclusion can be derived from the systems-theoretical tenets
of resilience theory itself. These tenets can be used to argue for special-purpose currencies
and local markets that complement the global economy, rather than an undifferentiated
globalisation of resource flows. The ultimate implications of resilience theory, in other
words, are vastly more radical and subversive than its current proponents imagine.

The ideological disarmament of disaster

The emergence of resilience discourse in recent years has been critically discussed from
several angles, tracing its intellectual ancestry in systems ecology, its ideological affinities
with neoliberal economics, and its incapacity to account for actual patterns of land use in
various parts of the world.2 It has also been scrutinised micro-sociologically as a social
movement explicitly determined to avoid criticism,3 which raises questions about its
solidity as a scientific endeavour.
2

Nick Hanley, Resilience in Social and Economic Systems: A Concept that Fails the Cost-Benefit
Test? Environment and Development Economics 3 (1998): 244 9; Sharachchandra M. Lele,
Resilience, Sustainability, and Environmentalism, Environment and Development Economics 3,
no. 2 (1998): 221 62 ; Paul Nadasdy, Adaptive Co-management and the Gospel of Resilience, in
Adaptive Co-management: Collaboration, Learning, and Multi-Level Governance, ed. Fikret
Berkes, Derek Armitage, and Nancy Doubleday (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press,
2007), 208 26; Fridolin S. Brand and Kurt Jax, Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience
as a Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object, Ecology and Society 12, no. 1 (2007): 23;
Nicholas M. Gotts, Resilience, Panarchy, and World-Systems Analysis, Ecology and Society 12,
no. 1 (2007): 24; Alf Hornborg, Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental
Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System, International
Journal of Comparative Sociology 50, nos 3 4 (2009): 237 62; Thomas Kirchhoff et al., The OneSidedness and Cultural Bias of the Resilience Approach, Gaia: Ecological Perspectives for Science
and Society 19, no. 1 (2010): 25 32; Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, Genealogies of
Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation, Security
Dialogue (Special issue: The Global Governance of Security and Finance) 42, no. 2 (2011): 143 60;
Andrew Park, Beware Paradigm Creep and Buzzword Mutation, The Forestry Chronicle 87, no. 3
(2011): 33744; Julian Reid, The Disastrous and Politically Debased Subject of Resilience,
Development Dialogue April (2012), 67 79; Michael J. Sheridan, Water: Irrigation and Resilience
in the Tanzanian Highlands, in Ecology and Power: Struggles Over Land and Material Resources
in the Past, Present, and Future, ed. Alf Hornborg, Brett Clark, and Kenneth Hermele (London:
Routledge, 2012), 168 81; Mats Widgren, Resilience Thinking Versus Political Ecology:
Understanding the Dynamics of Small-Scale, Labour-Intensive Farming Landscapes, in Resilience
and the Cultural Landscape: Understanding and Managing Change in Human-Shaped
Environments, ed. Tobias Plieninger and Claudia Bieling (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 95 110.
3
John N. Parker and Edward J. Hackett, Hot Spots and Hot Moments in Scientific Collaborations
and Social Movements, American Sociological Review 77, no. 1 (2012): 21 44. This article
documents how the emergence of the discourse on resilience has been a very self-conscious social
project founded on personal sympathies and the exclusion of dissenters.

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I have previously argued that the use of the concept of resilience in public and
academic discourse on human environmental relations reflects an ideological assimilation of environmental concerns by an establishment keen to avoid alarmist messages
challenging business as usual.4 Although represented as a synthesis of perspectives from
both the natural and the social sciences, resilience discourse generally appears to be
ignorant of most of the tenets of modern social science, except for the occasional
contributions from economists eager to develop new mathematical models for natural
resource management. Leading advocates of the resilience of traditional resource
management, for instance, reveal a very superficial grasp of anthropology.5 Their proposal
that the modern concept of social ecological systems has affinities with traditional ecocosmologies is highly misleading, as is obvious from the fact that the latter tend to extend
the social domain into the natural, rather than vice versa.6 Passing references to what LeviStrauss7 has called savage thought8 similarly miss the point of his analyses entirely. Even
more problematic than its distortions of anthropology, however, is what Lele identifies as
its pervasive inattention to major asymmetries in the interests and powers of the different
actors.9 The panarchical perspective, writes Gotts, has had little to say about social
elites and the often violent and oppressive ways in which they maintain themselves.10
This conspicuously ideological dimension of resilience discourse prompted Nadasdy to
conclude that it has the implicit goal of maintaining the social ecological relations of
capitalist resource extraction and agro-industry.11
The key metaphor of the resilience movement is the model of the adaptive cycle
applied decades ago by ecologist Crawford Holling to forest ecosystems in eastern
Canada. The famous horizontal figure eight recurs in countless publications on resilience
theory, including the cover of the canonical 2002 volume Panarchy,12 and seems to be the
principal common denominator of resilience research. As such, its many uses deserve
special scrutiny. Social scientists are commonly disturbed by claims that the model of the
adaptive cycle is applied not only to ecosystems or social ecological systems, but also to
social systems as such. Resilience theorists have thus proposed analogies, for instance,
between old-growth forests and large corporations, and between forest fires and financial
4

Hornborg, Zero-Sum World.

Berkes and Folke, Linking Social and Ecological Systems; F. Berkes, Sacred Ecology:
Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Philadelphia, PA: Taylor & Francis,
1999); Berkes, Colding, and Folke, Navigating Social-Ecological Systems.
6
Philippe Descola, In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
7
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1966).
8
Berkes and Folke, Linking Social and Ecological Systems, 12 13.
9
Lele, Resilience, Sustainability, and Environmentalism, 253.
10
Gotts, Resilience, Panarchy, and World-Systems Analysis, 6.
11
Nadasdy, Adaptive Co-management, 217 8.
12
The term panarchy was coined for a theoretical framework for understanding cross-scale
dynamics in living systems, founded on what is perceived as a framework of natures rules. In
contrast to the concept of hierarchy, implying rigid, top-down control, panarchy is supposed to
capture the adaptive [sic ] and evolutionary nature of adaptive cycles that are nested one within the
other across space and time scales, in which the faster, smaller levels invent, experiment, and test,
while the slower, larger levels stabilize and conserve accumulated memory of past successful,
surviving experiments. The recurrent adaptive cycle is conventionally represented as a horizontal
figure eight comprising four phases: exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganisation;
Gunderson and Holling, Panarchy, 5, 21, 34, 68, 72 6. Although the original allusions were to the
Greek god Pan and to hierarchy, the word panarchy, particularly when applied to social systems
and the autonomous creativity of subsystems, lends itself to associations to anarchy.
5

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panics.13 Apparently, the growth phase of the adaptive cycle is as applicable to forest
biomass as to the logging industry, or to fish stocks as to fisheries.14 This obviously
consumption? represents a logical contradiction when applied to social ecological systems where the
growth of societal capital is inversely related to the growth of natural capital, e.g. where
the growth of the logging industry is associated with the depletion of forest biomass, or the
growth of fishing fleets with the depletion of fish stocks. This contradiction can be resolved
only by concluding that the social and ecological components of such systems follow
separate and antagonistic cycles, where the growth phase of economic capital coincides
with the release phase of natural capital. But if social and ecological systems follow
distinct and contradictory cycles, it no longer seems meaningful to conceive of them as
components of a single system tracing a common adaptive cycle.
It has been observed that the concept of resilience can be more or less precisely defined
in engineering and ecology, but can serve only as a vague and contested metaphor in the
social and behavioural sciences,15 where it will inevitably raise normative questions about
the relative desirability of different states and conditions. In order to discuss the resilience
of a particular social ecological system, it would be necessary to define its geographical
boundaries, its exchanges with the world outside those boundaries, its physical
constitution (population, resources, metabolism, etc.), its social and cultural organisations,
the relevant physical and social parameters and their acceptable ranges of variability, the
vulnerability of these parameters to disturbance, and so on. In spite of the voluminous
rhetoric on the resilience of social ecological systems, I am not aware of any case study in
which all these aspects have been competently addressed. In fact, I doubt that it is at all
feasible to do so.
An example of the kind of quandaries that theorists of societal resilience will run into is
the problem of how to define its opposite, i.e. societal collapse. The concept has been
defined by anthropologists and archaeologists as a sudden loss of political or economic
integration and complexity, resulting in a fragmentation into less inclusive and more
autonomous social units.16 World history can be viewed as sequences of such collapses,
followed by periods of greater local autonomy and then renewed integration, but is it
correct and meaningful to approach world history as an adaptive cycle? What does it
mean to say that civilisations are complex adaptive systems? Can social systems
learn?17 At which level of social inclusiveness are the resilience theorists concerned with
resilience? Was the collapse of the Roman Empire a failure of resilience, or was
the survival of (some) post-imperial communities an index of adaptive success? Is the
contemporary world market a similar social project destined for collapse, or is the
preoccupation of neoliberal economists with resilience an indication of their commitment
to preserving it? If the collapses of past civilisations are to be approached in terms of
social ecological cycles, we again need to ask why the growth of societal capital (cities,
13

Peterson, Political Ecology and Ecological Resilience.

Ibid.
15
Brand and Jax, Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience; Park, Beware Paradigm Creep.
Actually, even its use in ecology has been contested as reflecting a particular cultural construction of
ecosystems (Kirchhoff et al., The One-Sidedness and Cultural Bias).
16
Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988); Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, eds., The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations
(Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1988).
17
Most social scientists would reject the notion that social transformations can be understood as
learning processes, and it is reassuring to find a forest ecologist similarly wondering how does an
ecosystem learn and adapt? (Park, Beware Paradigm Creep, 339).
14

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identity

A. Hornborg

temples, roads, etc.) tends to be inversely related to the growth of natural capital (forests,
topsoil, biodiversity, etc.), illustrating that social and ecological systems follow separate
and contradictory cycles?
A further dilemma for systems ecologists addressing social systems is how to handle
the concept of identity.18 The identity of an ecological system is a matter of objective
properties remaining within a certain range, whereas social or cultural identity refers to the
subjective experience of groups of people. Thus, for instance, archaeologists have
seriously questioned if there really was a Maya collapse in the tenth century, as there is
still a large population of people who speak a Maya language and identify with Maya
culture.19 Although my response to these archaeologists would be that it is essential to
distinguish between an objective historical loss of sociopolitical complexity and the
persistence of a sense of ethnolinguistic identity, the ecologists explicit suggestion to
focus on the concept of identity as what resilience is all about raises the question of how
the concept is to be used in trans-disciplinary approaches to social ecological systems.20
The theorising on social ecological systems by systems ecologists shows remarkably
little respect for social science research, and it is difficult to imagine examples of inverse
colonisation of natural by social science, as if, for instance, political scientists should
begin conceptualising ecosystems in terms of power structures. The ecologists theory of
society tends to strike social scientists as highly nave and generally at odds with
elementary social theory established decades ago. It appears to conceive of disasters such
as societal collapse, epidemics, starvation, and war as adaptive phases of more or less
natural cycles. Most remarkable is its neglect of decades of voluminous discourse on
political ecology.21 This neglect is evident even in contributions that explicitly propose to
integrate political ecology and ecological resilience.22 Several authors have also explicitly
contrasted the approaches of resilience theory and political ecology, arguing that the latter
is better equipped to account for actual patterns of land use and resource management.23
The currently expanding dominance of resilience theory within the field of sustainability
research can thus not be accounted for in terms of analytical progress, but appears to reflect
its capacity to ideologically defuse the challenges posed by political ecology and other
18

Cf. Brand and Jax, Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience, 4.

Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, eds., Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience,
Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010).
20
Brand and Jax, Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience, 4. It should be pointed out, however,
that these particular authors are generally critical of trans-disciplinary uses of the concept of
resilience, advocating instead a clearly specified, descriptive usage of the term within ecological
science. They argue somewhat ambiguously that, while sharing the term may have facilitated
communication across disciplinary boundaries, the understandings of its precise meaning would
differ (ibid., 9).
21
Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (London: Methuen, 1987);
Richard Peet and Michael J. Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social
Movements (London: Routledge, 1996); Raymond L. Bryant and Sinead Bailey, Third World
Political Ecology (London: Routledge, 1997); Roger Keil et al., eds., Political Ecology: Global and
Local (London: Routledge, 1998); Nicholas Low and Brendan Gleeson, Justice, Society and Nature:
An Exploration of Political Ecology (London: Routledge, 1998); Susan Paulson and Lisa L. Gezon,
eds., Political Ecology Across Spaces, Scales, and Social Groups (Chapel Hill, NC: Rutgers
University Press, 2005); Aletta Biersack and James B. Greenberg, eds., Reimagining Political
Ecology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Richard Peet, Paul Robbins, and Michael
J. Watts, eds., Global Political Ecology (London: Routledge, 2011).
22
Peterson, Political Ecology and Ecological Resilience.
23
See Sheridan, Water; Widgren, Resilience Thinking Versus Political Ecology.
19

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conflict-conscious approaches to humanenvironmental relations. In the remainder of this

article, I would like to analyse how power might be addressed within the framework of
resilience theory, so as to exploit the potential of Hollings systems ecology as a subversive
analytical framework. I offer these suggestions in response to recurrent assertions by
proponents of resilience theory that they are indeed very concerned with issues of power, but
have simply not yet turned their attention to them.

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Towards an understanding of power in social ecological systems

culture as
semiotic
system
> language
> classif.

power

objective
realities of
natural
sciencies
>flows of
energy and
material

Let us begin by agreeing with resilience theorists that social and ecological systems are
geared to each other, or coupled.24 With this established, we must conclude that a
theoretical framework capable of accounting for the dynamics of such coupled systems
will have to accommodate essential elements of both social and natural science. On the
one hand, an indispensable element of modern social theory is the pivotal role of culture,
understood as socially negotiated systems of meanings. Cultural systems of meanings can
also be referred to as symbolic systems, or even semiotic systems.25 Without reckoning
with the specific cultural ways in which the world is perceived by the particular category
of humans under consideration, there can be no social theory. A central aspect of culture,
of course, is language. The way in which humans collectively classify phenomena in
society and nature influences their behaviour in fundamental ways. On the other hand, an
account that accommodates the objective realities investigated by natural sciences must
also be capable of reckoning with material factors such as flows of energy and materials.
In other words, a theory of (power in) socio-ecological systems must be able to deal with
both cultural and material phenomena, i.e. with flows of signs as well as flows of matter
and energy.26 If the inattention to power is indeed a glaring lacuna in theories of socioecological resilience, we must encourage resilience theorists to seriously engage the topic.
Power is a hybrid phenomenon involving both cultural and material phenomena.
A general definition of power could be built on the observation that it universally implies
unequal access to material resources of some kind, including energy. But in order to be
complete, such a general definition would also have to account for how such inequalities of
access are socially maintained.27 A reasonable proposition is that the most pervasive, yet
least obvious, way in which social inequalities are maintained is through cultural
mystification, i.e. by rendering them either invisible or self-evident and natural. This is
simultaneously a quite concise way of defining ideology. Of course there are other means
of reproducing inequalities as well, notably coercion, but I would propose that they are
generally secondary to the power of ideology. The subtle power of culture or ideology
24

Berkes and Folke, Linking Social and Ecological Systems; Gunderson and Holling, Panarchy;
Berkes, Colding, and Folke, Navigating Social-Ecological Systems.
25
The term semiotic derives from the Greek word semeion, which means sign. Semiotics is thus
the general study of signs, of which symbols are a specific variety defined by the arbitrary (or
conventional) relation between the sign (e.g. a word) and what it stands for; cf. Thomas A. Sebeok,
Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
26
This binary opposition approximates the conventional Cartesian dualism of Society (or Culture)
versus Nature, understood as the analytical distinction between communicative/semiotic and
material aspects. I am well aware that the two poles are ubiquitously intertwined in the real world of
bodies, landscapes, and technologies, but this does not mean that the analytical distinction between
features of sociocultural versus natural (physical) derivation should be dissolved.
27
I realise, of course, that there have been many attempts to define power, and that this is not the
only one possible.

social and
ecological
systems are
geared or
"coupled"
we need a way
to incorporate
both social
theory and
natural science

power,
difference of
access to
resources
mantaining
of such diff.
> ideology,
concealment,
naturalization

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tends to be encoded in our basic and seemingly self-evident categories of thought, i.e. our
language.
Two examples will suffice to illustrate this point. The first is derived from the Inca
Empire of early sixteenth-century Peru, where the Inca emperor persuaded his millions of
subjects to invest their labour in agriculture, public architecture, warfare, and
manufacturing by claiming to be the son of Inti, the Sun God. He and his relatives were
able to claim a significant proportion of harvests and other produce by representing the
unequal exchange of labour and resources as a reciprocal exchange between the emperor
and his subjects. The material flows of resources hinged on the semiotic flows of words
through which the former were conceived and organised, e.g. mita (the labour tax) and
ayni (the ritual events in which peasants worked the emperors land in exchange for
chicha, i.e. maize beer). Needless to say, the volumes of maize that had been brewed into
the chicha served at the ayni represented only a tiny fraction of the maize that was
harvested. The power of the Inca emperor, in other words, consisted not only of flows of
matter and energy converging on his many warehouses, but also on the cultural concepts
(such as mita and ayni) through which the metabolism of the empire was reproduced.
The second example is much closer to home and will thus be more difficult to
assimilate, but the basic argument is the same. For more than two centuries now,
Europeans and their overseas dependents have learned to find it quite natural to sell their
cultural
labour time and natural resources on the market for money. They have contributed to
discourses European factories and industrial machinery, built cities, fought wars, and produced
that legitimize social commodities. The urban-industrial infrastructures that illuminate Europe on satellite
inequalities images of night-time lights indicate vast investments of labour time, energy, and materials.
Once again, we can observe that these asymmetric flows of matter and energy would not
have occurred without the semiotic flows of words by which they were orchestrated, e.g.
concepts such as wage and market price.28
A conclusion we can draw from these two examples is that cultural systems of
meanings, encoded in language, are essential components of any social arrangements for
the distribution of material resources. Inequalities in social power tend to boil down to
inequalities of access to such resources, including armies with which to assert them, all
legitimised by hegemonic discourses, whether concerned with the divine ancestry of the
Inca emperor or with the invisible hand of the market. The phenomenon of social power
includes not only unequal access to resources, but also unequal influence over the
construction of mainstream discourse. To understand social ecological systems, it is
absolutely necessary to address the political dimensions of such cultural discourses. In the
modern world, this means addressing the political dimensions of mainstream economics.
The revolutionary implications of (p)anarchy
Let us now turn to a central observation in Hollings framework for understanding the
operation and viability of living systems: the ideal congruity of temporal and spatial
scales.29 It appears that resilience in natural systems is importantly geared to the tendency
towards a general correspondence between level of integration and longevity, so that, for
28

To the extent that this argument is successful in revealing the significance of our everyday
vocabularies, the comparison with the Inca Empire is probably essential. This anthropological
method has been referred to as defamiliarization by cross-cultural juxtaposition; see George
E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment
in the Human Sciences (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1986).
29
Gunderson and Holling, Panarchy.

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instance, a forest is more permanent than a tree, a tree more permanent than a leaf, and so
on. This nested, hierarchical character of living systems safeguards the more inclusive
systems from being jeopardised by the failures of subsystems, and in some contexts vice
versa. The relative autonomy of subsystems vis-a`-vis lower or higher levels can thus be
regarded as a key principle for resilience and sustainability. Societies need to be able to
survive the demise of individual organisms, and organisms need to be able to survive the
failures of individual cells, but individual trees inversely need to be able to survive forest
fires, and local communities need to survive the collapse of empires or global markets.
collapse as
Such cybernetic insights long ago prompted anthropologist Roy Rappaport to define
communication maladaptation in terms of communicative failures such as oversegregation, hyperfailure or
30
'maladaptations' coherence, and usurpation. The general understanding of socio-ecological crises as
crises of communication can be traced to Rappaports mentor Gregory Bateson,31 who was
> money, very much involved in developing the field of cybernetics, or systems theory. If stripped of
trade,
some of the metaphysical confidence in diffusely organised wholes,32 which suggests
worldsignificant affinities between systems ecology and neoliberal economics,33 the approach is
market
of undeniable relevance for the continuing deliberations on sustainability.
It is remarkable that resilience theory has not proceeded from such central insights of
systems ecology to critically scrutinise the operation of communicative mechanisms in the
modern world, the most fundamental and pervasive of all of which is money.34 It would be
completely in line with Hollings emphasis on the principle of congruity of temporal and
spatial scales to observe that what economic anthropologists refer to as general-purpose
money systematically defies that principle, by making all kinds of values commensurable,
regardless of the level of scale they pertain to. Goods and services pertaining to the
reproduction of individual human organisms (such as food and beverages), for instance,
are considered interchangeable on the world market with goods and services pertaining to
the reproduction of entire ecosystems, or even the biosphere (such as technologies for
deforesting Amazonia). Due to the logic of general-purpose money, people thus routinely
trade rainforests for Coca-Cola, as I have elsewhere phrased such deplorable but
culturally natural practices.
In resilience discourse, the neglect of the destructive implications of general-purpose
money is closely related to the neglect of those of global systems of exchange. In the world
view of leading resilience theorists, social systems can be as small as a family or as large
as a nation.35 Presumably, the nation represents the most inclusive social system
conceivable for these theorists. Gotts observation that world-systems analysis could
strengthen work within the resilience conceptual framework36 is thus clearly an
understatement. General-purpose money has historically extended the reach of long-

30

Roy A. Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1979),
145 72.
31
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Frogmore: Paladin, 1972).
32
Bateson advocated a humble, even spiritual relation to the more inclusive system (or Mind) of
which individual humans are a part. He argued that the ambition of science and conscious purpose to
encompass such larger wholes is futile, although other states of consciousness associated with, e.g.
religion, art, or dreams can be more aligned with their recursive patterns. Although probably not his
intention, his trust in the wisdom of higher-level systems is in some respects cognate to mainstream
economists trust in the invisible hand of the market.
33
Walker and Cooper, Genealogies of Resilience.
34
Jack Weatherford, The History of Money (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997).
35
Gunderson and Holling, Panarchy, 107.
36
Gotts, Resilience, Panarchy, and World-Systems Analysis, 7.

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distance trade and is the cornerstone of todays increasingly globalised markets. Although
celebrated in neoliberal ideology, economic globalisation undeniably increases the
dependency and vulnerability of local communities. In recent centuries, writes Gotts,
largely European-derived changes in transport, communication, and military technologies have drastically reduced the autonomy of regional-scale systems.37 Yet, although
the globalisation of the market has thus increased vulnerability and reduced resilience,
neoliberal advocates of this very globalisation now present themselves as champions of
resilience.38
Why is it that resilience theorists have not yet zoomed in on money as a culturally
specific mode of communication, which is quite obviously a central factor in generating
unsustainable practices and increasing socio-ecological vulnerability? Would such an
observation be too politically controversial, or are they simply too embedded in the
cultural assumption that general-purpose money is an unquestionable feature of social
life? Considering what is at stake, e.g. one billion people on the verge of starvation on a
planet facing climate change and socio-ecological collapse, it is difficult to see how any
idea could be dismissed as politically too controversial. But my main point here is that
Hollings understanding of hierarchies of spatio-temporal scales in living systems in fact
provides excellent analytical tools for identifying modern money through its capacity to
confuse scales as a source of environmental degradation. Although the tendency of
money to promote the interchangeability of values at very different spatial and temporal
scales very obviously dissolves socio-ecological resilience, resilience theorists continue to
approach capital as if it was as natural as biomass and markets as if they were a kind of
ecosystems.
Even if the most well-meaning advocates of sustainability are thus unable to discern
the cultural peculiarities that appear to propel global society towards disaster, this is not
because there are no alternatives. It is in fact quite conceivable to organise an economy
with separate and incommensurable currencies for different kinds of values. Not only are
there plenty of ethnographic examples of such multi-centric economies documented by
economic anthropologists such as Paul Bohannan,39 but recent financial breakdowns in
countries such as Argentina and Greece have also invariably prompted initiatives in the
same direction.40 The creation of local currencies for community cooperation and survival
is a recurrent theme in the turbulent history of international finance, and is a central
component in the Transition Towns movement. The myriad ephemeral experiments with
the so-called Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) illustrate the attractiveness of the
idea of local currencies, but in order for this idea to generate a decisive and general break
with the destructive logic of modern money, it needs to be grounded in more profound
analysis and to be backed by national authorities.41 It is not entirely impossible that the
37

Ibid.
Walker and Cooper, Genealogies of Resilience; Reid, The Disastrous and Politically Debased
Subject.
39
Paul Bohannan, Some Principles of Exchange and Investment Among the Tiv, American
Anthropologist 57, no. 1 (1955): 60 70.
40
Peter North, Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
41
Rather than reviewing the extensive literature on alternative currencies, selectively endorsing and
rejecting various ideas, I have chosen to outline some fundamental requirements of a bi-centric
economy that could be expected to be both sustainable and attractive. Previous deliberations relevant
to the topic of alternative currencies include Eugene F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of
Economics as if People Mattered (London: Abacus, 1974); Margrit Kennedy, Interest and Inflation
38

general-purpose
money,
modes of
communication
and scale

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current financial turmoil in Europe and North America might provide opportunities for
serious discussions about how spheres of economic commensurability could be redefined
in the interests of financial, social, and ecological security.42

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Redefining commensurability: A strategy for socio-ecological resilience

A common denominator of the various experiments with LETS is the ambition to create an
alternative, informal economy alongside the formal economy based on state-issued
currencies. The main point has generally been to increase local interaction, local economic
diversity, and local control over resources. Crucially, however, the alternative local
currency in these experiments does not distinguish between local and non-local products,
i.e. values representing different scales of socio-ecological inclusiveness. In accordance
with the analysis discussed above, this ought to be the central function of a currency
system that would enhance local resilience. In order to achieve the desired effects, the new
local currency would need (1) to offer consumers a superior alternative to purchasing
commodities with regular money; and (2) to specify the range of (local) goods and services
that it can be exchanged for. In other words, a political decision to implement such an
alternative economic system would need to include a strategy (1) for persuading
consumers to actually use the local currency, rather than regular money; and (2) for
ensuring that its use actually promotes consumption of local goods and services. How
might this be achieved?
A first consideration would be if any nation state in its right mind would really want to
encourage the growth of an untaxed, informal economy in local communities. This would
no doubt be unfeasible in the present political climate, but it is not inconceivable that, a
few decades from now, financial or ecological crises might induce currently affluent
nations to seriously consider such options. The potential benefits of localising economies
are not restricted to biophysical consequences such as reducing transports, energy use,
carbon dioxide emissions and waste, or enhancing biodiversity through more complex
patterns of land use, but would include reducing federal expenses, e.g. for transport
infrastructure, environmental protection, health services, and social security, i.e. precisely
the kinds of public expenditures that are already proving a heavy burden for many welfare
states. Over the long term, such localisation would reduce marginalisation and
vulnerability to various kinds of crises, enhancing cooperation, diversity, and general
resilience at the local level. This is not to advocate a sudden abandonment of highly
Free Money (Sydney: Seva International, 1995); Ross V.G. Dobson, Bringing the Economy Home
from the Market (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993); Richard Douthwaite, The Ecology of Money
(Totnes: Green Books, 1999); Keith Hart, Money in an Unequal World (New York: Texere, 2000);
North, Money and Liberation; Stephen Gudeman, Economys Tension: The Dialectics of Community
and Market (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); Peter North, Local Money: How to Make It Happen
in Your Community (Totnes: Green Books, 2010); Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman, eds., Life
Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (London: Pluto Press, 2011).
42
It is interesting to note that anthropologists Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry conclude that
virtually all societies at some level recognise a cultural distinction between two separate economic
spheres: one concerned with the long-term reproduction of society, the other with the arena of
individual appropriation. The former sphere is concerned with the household and community, the
latter with commerce, wage labour, and exchanges between strangers. Although widely perceived
as generative of increasingly instrumental and impersonal social relations, in capitalist ideology, the
values of the short-term order have become elaborated into a theory of long-term reproduction;
Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange, in Money
and the Morality of Exchange, ed. Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 1 32.

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specialised, vulnerable, or disaster-prone communities, denying them the supra-local

relief that they have grown used to, but to encourage a long-term increase in local selfsufficiency, autonomy, and social ecological calibration. Carefully implemented and
monitored by the federal authorities, the reform would proceed at a pace that would not
risk jeopardising human or ecosystem health.
If these benefits were acknowledged, and the authorities persuaded that such a bicentric economy would indeed relax the pressure on fiscal resources, they might find that
the most efficient way of reorganising the economy in this direction would be to print and
distribute each month a certain sum of the new, special-purpose currency to all households
in proportion to their size.43 Assuming that households will wish to economise, we can
expect them to employ the new currency in purchasing local produce such as food,
firewood, and building materials and local services such as childcare, carpentry, and
repairs, because in doing so they would be saving much of their regular income for nonlocal expenditures such as information technology and pharmaceutical products. Over the
long term, of course, this shift would significantly reduce the demand for long-distance
imports of commodities that can be locally produced, which is very much in line with
resilience, sustainability, and any non-monetary measure of efficiency. The list of
potential advantages of such a shift can be made very long, particularly if we include not
only ecological and financial but also social and existential benefits.44 As the new currency
would be distributed to households without any required reciprocation, it could be
regarded as a kind of citizens wage or basic income that guarantees a minimum level of
subsistence even where no formal employment is available, or even desired.
The aim of such an intentional re-localisation of social metabolism (flows of matter
and energy) would be to generate a multitude of spatially restricted but overlapping
spheres of exchange, in which the average transport distances of goods and services are
significantly reduced. The idea would not be to create separate local currencies for
separate, bounded communities, but to allow the rationality of the (single) new currency to
work out its own spatial-metabolic logic in terms of overlapping geographical fields of
distribution. The assumption is that it would generate incentives to both consume and
provide goods and services with as short transport distances as possible. Instead of
visualising communities as bounded cells, we might anticipate their metabolic flows more
as intersecting local networks. If transport distance could once again be expected to
increase a commoditys price, as in the pre-railway world of von Thunen,45 localisation
and diversification of production would be encouraged through market competition. It
would not make economic sense, for instance, to use the formal currency to purchase
remotely derived (global) inputs, such as diesel, to produce goods or services for local
markets, where the potential gain is in local currency only. Until such price competition
itself suffices to promote the local economy, the determination of which goods and
services qualify as local could conceivably be organised in different ways, but it might
initially involve some kind of certification system specifying, for instance, a maximum
number of transport kilometres for different products sold at a given market, or a range of
neighbouring municipalities from which they may derive.

43

A simpler way of handling the practicalities of distributing this currency might be to issue it
electronically along with plastic cards.
44
Alf Hornborg, Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World (London:
Routledge, 2011), 157 60.
45
Johann Heinrich von Thunen, Von Thunens Isolated State (New York: Pergamon, [1826] 1966).

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Rethinking progress, globalisation, and development

The localising consequences of dividing the market into two separate spheres of exchange
will be recognised as, in some respects, running counter to developments that we for
centuries have learned to celebrate as progress and modernisation. In these respects, the
suggested reform would appear to be a step backward, but this is an illusion building on our
cultural definition of progress. A material localisation of the economy would not contradict
a continued communicative globalisation. The modern intensification of energy use, longdistance transports, and mechanisation represents the historical experience of a privileged
segment of global society over the past two centuries of fossil-fuelled capitalism. From a
global perspective, human progress should be defined not in terms of capital accumulation
but of enhanced conditions for harmony, sustainability, health, communication, and
security; in short: resilience. But rather than inspire resistance against the neoliberal world
order against which it was launched, the concept of resilience has been incorporated as a
central component of the neoliberal model itself.46 The radical implications of Hollings
recipe for resilience, which should provoke a serious confrontation with some foundational
assumptions of contemporary economic science, have yet to be explored by his followers.
A very important foundational assumption, not only of economics but also of modern
thought in general is that technological capacity should be viewed primarily as a
progression in time, rather than something that is (unequally) distributed in social space.47
The uncritical subscription to this assumption is reflected in the way technology is
discussed by resilience theorists, viz. as a means of extending the ambit for human
choices from local to regional to planetary scale,48 rather than as a means for some
humans to extend their ambit at the expense of others.49 Access to modern technology is
tantamount to relative purchasing power, and the rationality of any technological system is
inextricably geared to relative prices of labour and resources on the world market. Thus,
our cultural faith in money and the market are as essential to the material accumulation of
technology as was the cultural faith in the Sun God to the material accumulation of
terraces in the Inca Empire. Modern technologies cannot be made universally accessible to
all humans, but represent social strategies for redistributing time and space in global
society. In a long-term, inter-generational perspective, moreover, the contemporary
extension by means of fossil-fuel technologies of the ambit of affluent humans occurs
at the expense of future generations whose ambits are curtailed by exhausted oil reserves
and climate change. The extent to which the accumulation of modern technological
infrastructures is contingent on structures of market exchange would become very
apparent if the reform sketched above were to be implemented. If the demand for longdistance imports were to subside, there would simply be no incentive to maintain massive
infrastructures for transporting foodstuffs across the globe.
A predictable objection to the vision of a bi-centric economy would be that the
proposal is in line with the neoliberal strategy to urge states to relinquish their
responsibilities for the well-being of their citizens. I sympathise with the critiques voiced
46

Walker and Cooper, Genealogies of Resilience; Reid, The Disastrous and Politically Debased
Subject.
47
Hornborg, The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and
Environment (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2001); Hornborg, Global Ecology.
48
Gunderson and Holling, Panarchy, 101.
49
See, e.g. Zygmunt Baumans observation that globalisation for some has meant localisation for
others; Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); see
also Zygmunt Bauman, Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age (Cambridge: Polity,
2011).

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by Duffield50 and Reid,51 who argue that mainstream policies advocating communitybased self-reliance may simply have the purpose of shifting the burden of security from
states to people,52 and I fully share the underlying conviction that it should be the
responsibility of democratically elected authorities to safeguard as far as possible the
health and security of the people under their jurisdiction, which certainly means
intervening in the polarising logic of the capitalist market. Nevertheless, the problems of
sustainability and security currently facing humanity require analyses and policies that
transcend the conventional confrontation between right-wing advocates of the market and
left-wing advocates of state intervention. Unfortunately, the left-wing vision of a world of
universally affluent, technologically advanced and egalitarian nations is no longer
credible. The Scandinavian countries of the 1960s, which for many served as a model for
development, now represent a privileged corner of the world, blessed by the success of
their export industries on the very capitalist world market that they pretended to transcend.
The levels of consumption not least of fossil fuels enjoyed by average Scandinavians
are physically impossible to universalise among seven billion humans,53 nor are they
defensible from the perspectives of global sustainability and climate change. Ambitious
federal welfare programmes are feasible only as long as domestic export industries do not
relocate to countries with lower salaries and lower taxes, or as long as welfare and
consumption can be financed through credit. The recent financial crises in the USA and
Europe indicate that the capacity of developed nations to maintain a high and preferably
rising standard of living for a majority of their population is seriously constrained not only
by the logic of the capitalist world economy, but ultimately also by the finiteness of the
biosphere of which it is a part. This is not to deny that a minority of speculators has profited
enormously from these crises, but the problems of unrealistic standards of consumption
and of increasing fiscal deficits are not solved simply by redistributing such profits for
collective use.
It is no doubt true that concerns over resilience and sustainability have been co-opted by
the very neoliberal model which prompted them to emerge in the first place,54 but to dismiss
ecological and/or financial concerns as neoliberal mystifications is to deny real structural
problems that adhere not simply to capitalism,55 but also to the cultural phenomenon of
(general-purpose) money itself. To believe that some version of socialism would enable
seven billion humans to adopt the technological comforts and levels of consumption
currently enjoyed by average Americans or Scandinavians is almost as nave as imagining
that, in the distant future, humanity will plausibly expand outward in our solar system and
even further into the galaxy.56 Thinking realistically about the prospects for a sustainable
and more egalitarian world society means navigating between the Scylla of ruthless
neoliberalism and the Charybdis of high-tech utopias of solidarity. Both programmes
50
Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples
(Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
51
Reid, The Disastrous and Politically Debased Subject.
52
Ibid., 67.
53
Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact
on the Earth (Gabriola Island: New Society, 1996).
54
Reid, The Disastrous and Politically Debased Subject, 74.
55
John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of
Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
56
David Schwartzman, The Limits to Entropy: Continuing Misuse of Thermodynamics in
Environmental and Marxist Theory, Science and Society 72, no. 1 (2008): 43 62.

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presuppose that the money will be there to distribute, and that the critical issue is how to
distribute it. Neither programme seriously considers the possibility that faltering core areas
of the world-system such as the USA and Europe will be unable to maintain their positions as
regions of privileged purchasing power and undiminished mass consumption. In not having
grasped the conditions for their own feasibility, both these political visions would in due
time lead to socio-ecological disasters and unprecedented human suffering. It is against this
background that I have offered the vision of a bi-centric economy.

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Conclusions
In this admittedly wide-ranging discussion of the shortcomings and prospects of resilience
theory, I began by recommending its proponents to engage more respectfully with social
science, particularly its understandings of culture and power. They were also advised to
establish a critical distance to the metaphysical assumptions of complex adaptive systems
theory, particularly when applied to social systems. Furthermore, if resilience theorists
are as sincerely concerned about sustainability as I believe they generally are, they have
every reason to critically scrutinise the operation of general-purpose money, the global
market, and neoliberal ideology. Upon doing so, I am convinced that they would find the
idea of a bi-centric economy, as sketched above, entirely consistent with the fundamental
insights of resilience theory.
To conclude with one more glimpse from the ancient Andes, I would like to reflect on the
historical fate of the local village communities (ayllu) that in the early sixteenth century were
the building blocks of the Inca Empire. Although the emperor and his court were obviously
adept at extracting surplus from these communities, they must have been granted a significant
measure of autonomy, or so many of them would not have survived the traumatic collapse of
the empire, followed by centuries of colonialism and impoverishment. Many rural, Quechuaspeaking communities in Peru still practice today sustainable subsistence agriculture on
terraces constructed several centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire.57
The local, socio-ecological building blocks of pre-colonial Andean civilisations were
apparently sufficiently autonomous to recover from the recurrent shocks of supra-system
breakdown. It is very doubtful if modern communities in Europe or North America are similarly
resistant to wider systemic crises. Specialisation and dependency increases vulnerability, which
is tantamount to reducing resilience. It would be most useful if the resilience theorists, following
the implications of Hollings observations, focused their attention on how the very foundations
of current economic policies need to be radically reconsidered.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the LUCID workshop participants for their comments and to Per Bodin and Lennart
Olsson for suggestions on further reading.

Notes on contributor
Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He
is the author of The Power of the Machine (2001) and Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange (2011)
and lead editor of Rethinking Environmental History (2007), The World System and the Earth System
(2007), International Trade and Environmental Justice (2010), and Ecology and Power (2012).

57

It is perhaps fitting that indigenous Quechua women are portrayed on the cover of Berkes and
Folkes classical volume Linking Social and Ecological Systems.